


superglued human of proof

by Thealmostrhetoricalquestion



Category: Shadowhunters (TV), The Shadowhunter Chronicles - All Media Types, The Shadowhunter Chronicles - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Alec Lightwood Deserves Nice Things, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Introspection, M/M, Magnus Bane Deserves Nice Things, POV Alec Lightwood, Short One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-04
Updated: 2018-03-04
Packaged: 2019-03-26 23:37:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13868412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thealmostrhetoricalquestion/pseuds/Thealmostrhetoricalquestion
Summary: How you love is who you are.





	superglued human of proof

**Author's Note:**

> waheeey let's be pretentious together. 
> 
> title taken from Dodie's - Sick of Losing Soulmates. I love that song and I listened to it while writing, so here we go!

You’re young and bold and terrified of being different, and you hide it behind layers and layers of black. Not the colour of your clothes, but the colour of your voice, the way it shapes itself around words that refer to you. You drench yourself in it, and you leave the lighter colours for your siblings, your family. You don’t really have friends, and maybe that’s strange, but you don’t mind much. Shadowhunting is a lonely life, you’ve always been told. And there is safety in being alone. 

You’re careful. You don’t look at boys the way you want to. You’re only young, but you’re not stupid. You’ve never been stupid, and you know what it means when you feel something grow warm inside you at the sight of a boys’ smile. You want to hold a boys hand, and that scares you, so you push it down, down, down to the depths of a place you’ll learn never to touch. 

You’ll unlearn it, one day, but you don’t know that yet, so for now the world is dark and dismal, unloving of boys like you. 

You tip your chin up. Maybe the world has a problem with you, but you’ve got a bigger problem with it, with the demons that fill up every corner and crook. You throw yourself into your training, and you get better, faster,  _ stronger _ . Your aim solidifies, and your arrow finds its mark every time, and you shoot until your knuckles bleed, deep into the night.

Izzy notices. Izzy is your one constant, your sister, your family. It’s different than it is with Jace, but it’s not worse or better, it just is. You watch her grow, you watch her change. Her hair gets longer, smoother, and she flies now, dances rather than stumbles. She uses whips like they’re instruments, plays people the same way, and you don’t judge her for that. She wears red like a weapon, and you don’t judge her for that either. You know all about using colour to keep yourself safe, to keep others away. 

Izzy notices, and she helps quietly. She soothes you with words, slaps you upside the head when you’re being difficult, and brings you food when you can’t make yourself leave the training room. And sometimes you really can’t make yourself do it. Sometimes the only safety is behind these walls, in getting better, in improving. But Izzy is there, and she’s there for you, and she does what you can’t do for yourself. 

You do the same for her, when she falls. She doesn’t fall often, but when she does, it’s hard and messy, and you make sure you’re there to pick up the pieces. You love her, and it’s as simple as that. 

You always thought of love as a simple thing. Maybe that’s the naive part of you, but that’s what you thought. It shouldn’t be hard, you think, loving someone, and maybe it wouldn’t be if the world were kinder. But the world isn’t kind, and people are even less so, and when you meet Magnus, everything you ever thought you knew about love goes out the window. 

Love isn’t simple. It’s complex and cruel and it’s made to break you. That’s what you think, at first, because you’re angry. You’re angry that this man makes you feel things, dredges up the darkness that you buried under ribs and marrow and fat and bone. You’re angry that he makes you feel  _ wonderful _ . And you do. You feel wonderful, you feel like every cliché that’s ever been written about love, and you think that maybe there’s a reason why they were written. Clichés are only clichés because everybody knows them, feels them. 

You find yourself drawn to him, and you pretend not to know why. It’s easier to think like that, to pretend that this isn’t something that’s been a long time coming. If it wasn’t Magnus, it would have been someone else, you tell yourself, but after a while, you’re not so sure. Only Magnus can draw everything out so easily. Only he can pinpoint the exact part of you that’s hurting and heal it. Maybe not all the way, but that’s because the rest is up to you. 

He pushes, but not in a way that hurts. He pushes because he feels the same, you realise, in awe. He pushes because he looks at you and he likes what he sees, and although you can’t fathom why that is, you know it’s true. And you know you feel the same in return. It’s just hard to admit it. 

You start to learn him. You learn the way he moves and talks and smiles, all from watching him closely, and that’s not even a choice, not really, because your eyes won’t follow anything else when he’s in the room. But then you start to make it a choice. You move closer, and you talk back, and the confusion that rears its head isn’t ugly, it’s just human, but maybe that’s an ugly thing to be. You’ve hidden all of this for so long that you barely remember the wants you had when you were little, you hardly recognise them for the same wants you have now. 

You don’t know if this is something that everyone goes through. It can’t just be you, in this world full of millions and millions of people, all struggling and working and suffering quietly and not so quietly, but the thing is, you don’t know. You don’t know anyone who thinks like this, who has these same wants, and you don’t know what to do, so you decide to fucking get married. 

That’s your excuse, and it’s a bad one, you know it is. You back it up with things like duty and responsibility, but a wedding isn’t really the right way to fix all of this, and you know that too. It sure as hell doesn’t make either of you feel better. But being human is strange and ugly and messy, and love isn’t simple. It’s convoluted and complex and cruel, and you’re not angry anymore, not really, just resigned. 

And then the day comes, and you’re standing, surrounded by the brightest colours, and all you feel is dark, dark, dark. You smile with your teeth, because the small ones feel fake. You smooth your hair back. Everything is dark, dark, dark, and you feel that mess of colour inside you, and you realise, quite suddenly, that it was never darkness at all. 

This is darkness. Standing somewhere bright and feeling like you’re drowning in grey, that’s darkness. Doing the wrong thing for all the wrong reasons, that’s darkness. Denying yourself love because it’s terrifying and confusing, that’s darkness. 

These feelings inside you, these old wants that you pushed back and down and under, those are bright. They aren’t simple, but they don’t need to be. You’re full of love, you realise, although you’re pretty sure you’ll deny that, if you’re asked. You’re full of love and potential, and there are a thousand roads stretched out in front of you, but you only want to take one. 

Magnus appears at the end of the road, and you take it. Enough, you say, because it is. You’ve had enough of all the darkness. And it is enough, to have this, it’s more than enough. It’s more than you ever thought you’d get to have, and you haven’t even reached the end of the road. 

Kissing him is bright. The grey washes away, and you hold him, and the kiss goes on and you know people are looking and you can’t quite bring yourself to care, because you feel full and bright, and all those old wants are back, and you can do them now. You can want them freely, and freedom is everything. 

You kiss him, and he kisses you, and it’s not the end of your road, but it is the start of one you’ll walk together. 

*

Things go to shit, as things tend to do, but for a brief moment, everything is bliss. You learn his home and his mouth and the way he plays pool, and you think you can’t get happier than this. You feel at home near him. But there’s a small part of you insisting that things will go wrong, go badly, and even bright gold sheets can’t quite erase that fear. 

And then you tell a lie, and you take a break, and things fall apart, and you’re not sure how to stitch it all back together. You’re desperate. You’re desperate and he’s angry, and he has every right to be. 

The thing you have learned the most, during all of this, is that this might be your story, but he has his own. He has old wants too. He has a past and a family in the friends that he lost and loved over the years, and it’s not a matter of competing with that. He has a sadness inside of him that’s old and deep, and a pain that stings like a fresh wound on bad days. He is the brightest man you know. He’s powerful and strong and brave, and you love him.

He loves you, too. That’s what you have to remember. He loves you too, and you love him. At least, you think he does. He has reasons for doing what he does, for breaking up with you, and they’re good, strong reasons. You broke it all first anyway, when you snapped his trust in half. 

It’s going to take a while, you realise. And it might not quite be the same. You’re okay with that, you think. You’re there for Izzy and Max and Jace, and you try to be there for Magnus too, because you love him and you know, that despite everything, he’s there for you too. 

You fumble through your days. There’s a part of you that doesn’t think you deserve to fix this, but there’s a much bigger part of you that can’t bear to let it all go without trying. 

So when the battle is over, you draw him aside. You stand with your feet on wet ground and your face drenched in neon, and you tell him the truth, like you should have done in the beginning. You tell him that you can’t bear to live without him. 

And he hears you. And he loves you too, and you never should have doubted that, and you never will again. 

It’s not the end. Not really. There are still things to fix and talk about, but that can be done from the safety of gold sheets and warm hearts. You walk home in the dark and cold, and you feel warm with colour. The streetlamps douse you in yellow and the rain drops grey on you and the ground is black with water, but you are both so bright. 

Love isn’t simple, you know that now, but it isn’t cruel either. It’s one of those things that isn’t a feeling, isn’t an action, isn’t a belief. How you love is who you are. It makes up everything inside of you, that’s what you’ve learned. It’s what he’s taught you, and that wasn’t his job, his purpose, it was just a side-effect of knowing each other. You both have your own stories, and somewhere in the messy middle, they overlap, and that - that’s love. 

*

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Please leave a comment/kudos if you liked this, and let me know what you thought, I'd really appreciate it. And come say hey @thealmostrhetoricalquestion on tumblr. Thank you!


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